


sugar & the mint

by misandrywitch



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2016-02-07
Packaged: 2018-05-18 21:48:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5944267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Let’s torch it,” she says, glaring at the half-assembled and now sideways chairs. “It’ll be symbolic of, I don’t know, resistance against the domineering power of capitalism as represented by assembly-line Swedish furniture."</p>
            </blockquote>





	sugar & the mint

**Author's Note:**

  * For [raysquared](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raysquared/gifts).



> happy vday!!! original prompt was for "lardo and shitty vs. ikea furniture" but the other prompt i received was jackbitty established relationship & that idea stuck in my head even though i chose not to write it (i am firmly anti soulmate au & i'm sorry that i am that way but i just am) & it turned into this. also, this [text post](http://shittybknights.tumblr.com/post/137643195717/fireandlifeincarnate-in-your-otp-whos-the-home)

There are times, Lardo thinks, when a continuing sense of excitement and continuity in her life is wanted, embraced even, some kind of reflective protection against stodgy adulthood that she covets and often times even works at. 

Of course, other times it would be nice to come home after spending the morning hauling very heavy canvases up and down in the little studio she works at in middle-of-the-summer humidity to find things in her house calm, quiet, tidy, and not summarized by a giant collection of Ikea-branded pieces of wood heaped together in an avant garde pile in the middle of her porch. She sees it first thing when she comes in through the front door because the door from the kitchen to the backyard is wide open. 

Nobody's life is perfect, of course, and maybe you can't have one without the other. Even so, she sighs and puts her hands on her hips. "Hey Shits!" 

"Yo!" He's in the backyard somewhere, and Lardo drops her purse onto the kitchen table and goes outside to find him.  

“Uh. You taking up sculpture now? Because I could get behind that but not if it means I need to become a lawyer.”

Lardo stares at the stack of wooden slats and stakes jumbled haphazardly together on the edge of the porch. It takes a minute of frowning to guess that it’s supposed to be a chair. Maybe. Maybe two?

“Eh,” Shitty is lounging in the hammock, which is strung between one of the trees in their tiny backyard and the porch railing. It’s a questionable setup and Lardo’s waiting for the day that the railing gives in, taking the hammock with it. From the back door, she can see the crown of Shitty’s head and one hand, which is dangling down into the grass. The other is wrapped around a glass which he’s got balanced on his stomach. “Thought I’d take a stab at it.”

It’s Sunday afternoon, and their little backyard is baked in the kind of late summer heat that feels so real it’s almost solid, the kind that sinks into your bones and sits there and makes everything feel that much slower and sleepier and softer. Here, it’s perfect and almost deliciously warm. At the beautiful and completely impractical little studio downtown where Lardo worked all morning, it had been stifling and sleepy and frustratingly slow going. She’d almost forgotten she’d asked Shitty to pick up lawn furniture when she’d rolled out bed that morning, though why he’d decided to go to Ikea she really doesn’t know. The variety of furniture he’d tried to assemble on his own at his first apartment near Harvard had been an unmitigated disaster that he’d had to have Jack come rescue him from.

Now, of course, they’re all the way across the country which means that Lardo will just have to untangle this mess on her own.

“And you didn’t wanna, I don’t know, follow the directions?”

“Can’t direct genius,” Shitty wiggles in the hammock to glance towards her and the porch. “It’s abstract, man.”

“Uh huh.” Lardo kicks off her shoes and then pulls off the shirt she’s wearing to reveal the tank top she’s got on underneath. She drapes the shirt over the railing and sits down on the porch steps, digging her toes into the grass and staring, still bewildered, and whatever Shitty’s done to the practically-idiot-proof chairs. Whatever it is will take more than a few minutes of observation, so she gets up and hops up the steps to lean over the railing and look down at him. He smiles up at her.

“You created a clusterfuck,” she says. “A cock-up.”

“A what-what?” He grins sideways and upside down at her, and Lardo rolls her eyes.

“Shit,” she says. “Y’know, if you keep lying around all day out here without pants on our neighbors will call the cops and you will get arrested for indecent exposure.”

“You don’t think she really meant that, did you?”

“You didn’t have to talk to her. She sounded very serious.”

“Fascists,” Shitty mutters, and instead of standing up he rolls out of the hammock onto the grass, then stands up. “You think she’d never seen a dong before. I’ve got fuckin’ boxers on and everything!” He shakes his head and stomps across the grass to the porch, hops up it rather than going up the steps. “Want a brewski?”

“Yeah,” Lardo turns her attention back to the pile of would-be-furniture. “Well, wait. What were you drinking?”

“A julep.” Shitty’s gone into the kitchen but he pokes his head out the window, holding up a sprig of mint.

“What? You planning on going to the Kentucky Derby?”

“Well, if you don’t have any plans tonight…”

“Doing Bitty proud.”

“My one and only goal, bro!”

“You’ve convinced me.” He usually does. He grins through the window and his head vanishes, and Lardo hears him opening the fridge and pulling a glass out of the cupboard. She sits down on the steps and starts pulling the tiny wooden pegs holding the would-be chair together out, stacking them neatly on the porch. Shitty had gotten out their toolbox (Lardo’s toolbox) but hadn’t actually used it, so nothing is firmly attached to anything else and it isn’t difficult to yank them apart. She suspects he hadn’t really tried to follow the directions, that he’d either thrown himself into it on a burst of Shitty-like inspirational nonsense, assuming he’d be able to just figure it out, or that he’d just gotten bored. Probably the latter, honestly. He’s not exactly logical but he can be analytical, brilliantly inspired when he sets his mind to it or wants to. Of the two of them, Lardo’s the logical one, who makes lists and schedules and ensures they’re on time to things they’ve promised to do, schedules payments, calls their parents.

Ironic of course, that she’s also the artist, but that’s just how it goes.

Shitty comes back onto the porch with a glass in hand and his cutoffs on as Lardo is lining up the pieces of the chairs in a neat row and unfolding the book of instructions that comes with them. She stares down at the cartoony drawings that are supposed to indicate how to assemble the chairs.

“You think they’d use words,” she says. “Rather than illustrations of interpretive dance.”

“Or draw some that look like women,” Shitty says, and sets her glass down on the porch. “Y’know, just a thought.”

The drink he’s mixed is a little too sweet, but Lardo doesn’t mind. It’s cold, the mint cutting through the bourbon to sit on her tongue. Lardo doesn’t know if she’s ever had a julep before-- it’s a funny, old-fashioned drink, and she wonders where Shitty got the idea to make one. A funny, adult thing to do on a hot Sunday afternoon.

That’s the way their lives are now, Lardo supposes as she watches him hop back into the hammock, his legs dangling off the sides and his glass, refilled, balanced again on his stomach. A part of her had been terrified that, with college behind them, they’d be forced into the routines that adults follow, the things expected of them. There are patterns and paths lives are supposed to trace, expectations. Lardo feels lucky that her own parents care so little about “shoulds” and “needs,” that they’ve always been happy to let her figure out things on her own. Shitty’s mom is the same way, with the weight of her own “should” and “need” mistakes adding bite to her perspectives.

Credit cards. Home loans. The right drinking glasses for mint juleps. There’s a calendar on the wall of their hallway with neatly organized “to-do’s,” and it hangs next to the now-framed sign that reads “Yo marry me Jack Zimmermann!” Jack’s tidy signature is in the right-hand corner.

Shitty goes to work at 9am every weekday morning in a suit, and he comes home at 5, sometimes later. He works a lot-- his family would like that. Immigration law, a lot of it pro bono-- that part not so much.

They’re not married. He’d asked her once, as a joke, and Lardo had laughed and laughed. She’s got no doubt that when Jack and Bitty tie the knot, in some impeccably decorated ceremony with a Beyonce soundtrack and a lot of mint-green, that she’ll catch the damn bouquet, and they’ll both laugh about it.

That’s what adulthood is, in a way, an odd series of checks and balances in a long-running joke that only a few people are actually willing to admit is actually funny. He has to wear suits, Lardo gets away with a lot of black. He’s always going to make more money than she will, just a fact of their professions and something she tries not to let bother her. She keeps them on track; pays bills, buys groceries, takes the car for oil changes, bothers him about going to bed on time. Their books are all mixed up together on the shelves in their living room; books of photos, science fiction series, law textbooks, biographies. They argue about what to listen to in the car.

That’s the space between “you” and “me” and “us,” and that line, and crossing over it, has so much more meaning than some words and a ring ever will.

They do have matching tattoos, done on a dare on vacation when they’d both had way too much tequila in their systems. Lardo doesn’t regret it. It’s her artwork, anyway, on her thigh above her knee.

She disassembles ovens and covers canvases with paint in the studio she gets to use for working at the gallery, and he works in a tiny office downtown, and their fridge is covered in pictures from their friends’ lives, and Lardo has framed every picture Jack ever gave them. They hang in their bedroom, next to the pieces from her senior thesis, their diplomas, books they haven’t bothered to shelve and dirty-cheap paintings that Lardo adds improvements to. And there’s too much sugar in her drink, but she doesn’t mind it.  

“Hey ho, Lardo,” Shitty warbles from the hammock as she starts to reassemble the chairs. She’ll probably paint them when she’s done putting them back together again, tie-dye pattern maybe. “Let’s go! Lardo! Show them chairs who’s boss.”

“You were wasted in hockey,” Lardo says. “Should’ve been a cheerleader.”

“Maybe when I reinvent myself ten years down the line,” Shitty says. “I could carry pom poms and wear a short skirt. An official Zimmermann Cheerleader, if Jack’s still playing. I’ll just cheer him into higher education. Hey ho! Let’s go! Lardo!” He waves his hands above his head and almost knocks his drink over onto his stomach.

“You think he will?”

“Eh?” Shitty puts the glass down on the grass, out of harm’s reach.

“Jack.”

“Yeuuup,” Shitty says, with comfortable certainty. It’s the kind of thing they’ve probably never spoken about, because Jack wouldn’t unless he was actually going to do it, but she knows it’s something that Shitty knows anyway, because that’s how things are when you’re somebody’s best friend for years and years.

Something else about adulthood that Lardo likes. Friendships shift and settle in for the long haul, become less immediate but more longterm. It’s easier to recognize the impact people have had on each other.

In the hammock, Shitty’s picked up his impromptu cheer again, making up words as he goes. Lardo shakes her head.

“You could, you know, give me a hand.”

“I’m providing moral support,” he says. “And I’d rather not get murdered, thanks.”

“Fuck off, Knight,” Lardo laughs, and turns her attention to the stupid book of instructions and the chairs. She gets the bottom of the first one assembled okay, so it stands up on its own, and then starts to screw together the pieces that will make up the armrests which is where she gets stuck. Shitty had mixed all the pieces for the two chairs together and she’s having a hard time telling the right and left sides apart, and there isn’t anything in the directions to clarify it because the directions are all but useless.

Maybe she’ll just salvage the pieces for art, Lardo thinks, scowling at the pieces of wood scattered on the deck. And they’ll just thrift shop some deck furniture. She might get sued by Ikea for it, but it would be a good bit.

The heat of the afternoon had felt nice when she’d first stepped outside, but now it’s unpleasant. Her hair is hot, and sweat is gathering at her hairline and down her back, and the ice in her drink melts before she can finish it or the chairs.

“Lards,” Shitty calls from the hammock, as she’s looking forlornly at her now-watered-down julep. She looks over to see his head, turned sideways, poking over the fabric to look at her. “Dude. I’m like 80-percent sure that the thingamabob you’ve got there is supposed to go into that fucker on the bottom, not across the side.”

Lardo stares at the wooden rod she’s holding. “What?”

“You’re jabbing it in the wrong spot, bro.”

Lardo feels a sudden stab of annoyance, and completely lets the joke with “jabbing” and “fucker” and “bottom” go unsaid. There is, she supposes, a possibility that she is jabbing the fucker in the wrong spot, but she’s following the damn directions as best she can, and it isn’t like Shitty’s done a whole lot better.

“I don’t think so,” she says, just to be contrary.

“Look at the--”

“I’m following the directions, Shits, alright? The direction are shitty.”

“Trying for some constructive criticism, Lards,” Shitty says, helpfully.

“Take another stab at it,” Lardo snaps, and stabs the wooden rod into place. She yanks it out a second later, because it is in the wrong spot and it’s pretty obvious now that she’s put it there. “Ow!”

“Lards.”

“What?” Lardo sticks her thumb in her mouth and scowls.

“Sorry,” Shitty says. “C’mere.”

Still scowling, Lardo gets up and steps over the chair and then, because she can, kicks it so it falls sideways onto the deck. That makes her feel better. “What?” she says again.

“Fuck Ikea,” Shitty says, and Lardo lets him catch her by the waistband of her pants and tug her so she slides sideways into the hammock. She doesn’t make it easy for him, but she doesn’t try and stop him, and she ends up with her legs sticking up awkwardly and her elbow in his stomach, which he deserves.

“Let’s torch it,” she says, glaring at the half-assembled and now sideways chairs. “It’ll be symbolic of, I don’t know, resistance against the domineering power of capitalism as represented by assembly-line Swedish furniture."

“Rad,” Shitty says. “A bonfire. That fucker next door will for def call the fuzz.”

“Still don’t know how you never got busted for that firepit at the Haus.”

“Networking, man. I bribed all the cops in the area with Bitty’s baked goods.”

“Well get Bitty on the phone ASAP.”

“We’ve got some of his pralines left from last week, I think. But I’m not giving those up. They’re more valuable than gold.”

Lardo wriggles around so she’s all the way in the hammock, freeing her arms and tangling their legs up together in the process. She rests her hands on both of his shoulders and the hammock swings back and forth a little wildly as she gets comfortable. She’s not entirely sure it was made to hold two people, or that the the mount attaching it to the porch that they jerry rigged will actually support both of them. No time like the present, right?

“I’m an idiot,” Shitty says, looking up at her. He’s shading his face from the sun with one hand and his eyes are very green. “Sorry about the chairs.”

“They’re just chairs,” Lardo says. “I’ll fuck with ‘em later when it’s not a trillion degrees out here.”

“So, uh,” Shitty grins suddenly, the kind of grin that stars at the corners of his mouth and eats up his whole face. “D’you think our neighbors will call the cops on us if we have sex in this hammock? Eh?”

“Yes,” Lardo says dryly. “Definitely.”

When he kisses her he tastes like mint and marijuana and Sunday afternoon summer sunshine, and the afternoon stretches on long and warm and lazy, with nothing in the way.

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from [julep](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppn7eQSBdJQ) by the punch brothers & i'm going to include a link because i want everyone on earth to listen to this band. "lifetimes of summer, love ever after"


End file.
